


do you feel the ground begin to shake

by remnantof



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Body Horror, Cecil is Inhuman, Established Relationship, M/M, Magical Realism, Mythology - Freeform, POV Second Person, Weird Biology, but not entirely, i really don't know how to tag this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-20
Updated: 2013-07-20
Packaged: 2017-12-20 19:43:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/891108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/remnantof/pseuds/remnantof
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Radon Canyon is closing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	do you feel the ground begin to shake

"Are you real," Carlos whispers during your third date. Perfect, polite Carlos always saves the really searching queries for private moments, though of course privacy is pretty relative within the city limits, and a lot more relative beyond them. The smell of coffee is fading from his living room, while its stains set their rings on the papers strewn over the table. The sweet edge of this sweet man's research rests just against the inset of your bare foot, and his adorably red sock is the only thing between his sole and your arch. There is the rest of him to consider, the weight dipping you into his side and the density of him holding you up against it. Your head dipped to his head, his hair curling against your face. He smells like the Sand Wastes blowing through the grease fugue of Rico's Pizza, and the thunder taste of a successful bloodstone ritual, and Old Spice. 

You most definitely do not wish your man was the Old Spice man, as you would never trade him for any other man in the world, but you're glad he can smell like that man. And pizza, and thunder, and the Sand Wastes.

"I sometimes wonder that about everyone else," you answer, cheerfully. Cheerful to discuss any topic, in this moment, in this state. The air conditioning in his apartment is not what it could be--you've explained to him the proper glyphs to slip under the superintendents door, but he says things like, _I enjoy the heat_ , and, _I think it's the window seals_ , which is just too adorable to argue with. "The world is a terrifying place, even more terrifying to experience alone."

Carlos nods, lifting his hand out of yours to drag over the delicate skin of his face, which is not as delicate as you first thought but very soft above his facial hair, which is also pretty soft, compared to many other things. You haven't touched the bags under his eyes to see how soft they are, but you do notice they're a little larger, a little darker than before. 

You are not a stupid man, or: a stupid man is not the kind of man you're aspiring to project. Taking his hand back from his face, you kiss the part of it that is delicate, stretched thin at the temple. "You're not experiencing this alone," you assure him. You squeeze his hand. You lean yourself into him, over him: you are expanding out of your skin in the dry heat of his apartment on an uncancelled Friday night, which was reinstated at the last moment to leave u both with a large gap of free time. When he looks up at you, your borders are going heavy-hazy and in all the things you know, there will never be any certainty regarding what Carlos sees, when he looks at you. But you smile down at him, or up at him, or around him, and he squeezes your hand in turn.

And then, _most_ importantly, he asks you to spend the night.

-

You used to be a man, you think. You took some pieces of your parents but you didn't look much like them. Which was okay, because they didn't look much like each other, and that's all you remember anyway. And a woman's dark dark hair spilling around her face. Thick hair, black hair. Perfect hair. A perfect woman.

Sometimes in the night, when you are not dreaming of the terrors of the void, or laying awake contemplating the meaningless of existence, or trying to understand the concept of death--or cursing Steve Carlsberg for having the gall to fax you his _drivel_ at _four am,_ really Steve--you wake up from an entirely different kind of dream, reaching your hands into the dark and thinking of the face you can't remember, in all that hair. The faceless old woman specific to your home, hovering in the edge of your vision, tuts at you and shakes her head in the glow of your laptop's monitor. You ask her to play that one video, with the cats, until you can sleep again. People really are missing out when they fail to cultivate a relationship with her, you think, and then you dream of cats in boxes neither alive nor dead, but probably dead, let's be real.

Carlos has both hands in your hair, which is not the woman's hair but not quite the man's hair. But it's yours and it feels good, it feels _spectacular_ , Carlos' fingerprints catching and scraping in little pulls against your scalp and his teeth catching your lip. You feel really solid, right now. Really alive, you're sweating and it's just sweat, and you can feel the relief in some relay back to his brain that makes him touch a little harder, a little longer. You're solid right now, and he _wants_ \--

or doesn't, or. He pauses, lifting away from you with blown pupils and his perfect hair gone perfectly wild. "Do you feel anything," he asks, looking to the window, then the counter separating the kitchen from the living room. You moved the mugs to it earlier, and you think he might be focusing on them now. "Uh," you intone, making what you regret later is a really childish, _duh_ sort of face: "I'm feeling kind of a lot of things at the moment--"

He frowns in the distinct way you've come to understand means, _you're not cute right now_ , which would be more devastating if it didn't make your entire lower body feel a lot _less_ solid than the rest of you. This man is really too much for you, too much for the ground he walks upon, too much for Night Vale. 

Nothing moves. The air conditioner struggles on and on, Carlos breathes audibly, raggedly on your chin. Parts of your lower body are really very solid again, but you finally hear it--the drag scratch of the needle on paper, leaves of it folding and piling on the floor in front of his desk. "Another earthquake," he breathes. "You don't feel them? You've never felt one?"

He sounds so desperate, and somehow sure, that you try. Focus on the couch beneath you, the press of your weight into it, your combined weight--but if the world is shaking, you don't know, and you wouldn't care. "Help me feel it," you say to his mouth, and before the embarrassment fully forms in your gut, he's smiling, he's laughing, hiding his face in your shoulder and his mouth against your neck. "Help me," you repeat, and it feels like a real plea, coming up and up and up, coming up from the earth. "Help me," and he digs his teeth into your voice until it's a gasp, gas from a fissure. He's baked you into this shell and now he's cracking it open. You're cracking, you're shifting--

-

Before there was Night Vale there was the desert. Before there was the desert there was the ocean. You do not remember the ocean, but you remember the silt it left when it drained down down down, when the last rivers drained into the canyon and dug it a little too deep. A little too deep into the fabric of things, and the fabric of things started to dig back. He came up all twisted from the entrails of dead fish, beached whales going choke-sour in the sun. Ravens took his eyes and gave him fish spines for teeth. Too many teeth.

That was the other side, oil and water spilling into the gap and history begins when it is written, but it is also rewritten, and this was kind of like that. An ocean, then a waste, then a desert. The sand was soaked with oil, as good a placenta as any when you're dragged up out of the clay. The first thing you remember, really remember, is breath, and the taste of oil and salt. The angels descended with that first pearly bone for your eyes, and you opened them to the sun baked world and all it's brightness, shining against the void.

The town came later, as towns do. The man came later, curious and contrary and in love enough, with the desert. In love enough, with the town. Bright and shining new enough, uncertain enough, that his skin fit over your purpose, his face fit over your bone-white eyes, his voice was smooth as the sands and happy to greet you. You remember his smile, the way you remember inception, creation, the hierarchy of the angels and the tiered heavens, the lists of words, the dead fish, the correct bloodstone rituals to bring a gentle rain that _doesn't_ come through Radon Canyon and turn to gently pouring acid.

It's exact reproduction is beyond you, but the town, the town--and his love, his enough, he's enough, and--

the second man came later, curious and courageous, and you do _try_.

-

"Life is definitely about evil, and existential horror, and that little feeling you get in your center of gravity, you know: that clenching of the diaphragm, when you really _think_ about the reality of all those ugly parts inside of you, and how fragile they are, and how many things can go wrong."

You pause, hovering at the microphone with your notes neatly unread before you. "But sometimes, dear listeners, life is also about the good, and the beauty that can exist alongside those things.

"I am referring, of course, to the way our own dear, perfect Carlos appeared this morning, fresh from the shower and cooking the _fluffiest_ scrambled eggs I have ever had the pleasure of eating. If such a moment isn't proof of benevolence and joy in the world, what is? And really, the fact that only _some_ of us will be blessed with the fleeting comfort of real love is what makes it truly special, the way I imagine the comfort of a real death will be, should you earn it."

-

A list of things: coffee stains, the pleasant way your legs shake when you are driving a car, low and unceasing moans you probably aren’t really hearing (but are definitely hearing), paper coasters, those birds that are green and black at the same time, DUNES, the distant blinking of hazard lights in the dark, rabbit meat, striped lizards, the pop of fried okra spilling its seeds in your mouth, foreign radio voices in heavy static, bees, so many bees, how did all these bees get here?

-

The bees swarm out toward the canyon at about three pm, and as everyone settles in around six, return with bodies the size of basketballs--which you think makes them a lot easier to deal with, honestly, but a lot of people panic anyway. They never listen to you, like you haven’t _always_ told them when it is and isn’t time to _really_ panic. You think they’re kind of cute, but you also think Carlos is incredibly handsome when he rolls up the sleeves of his lab coat and solders a pipe to one of old woman Josey’s more dilapidated trucks to smoke them out.

Balled up on the ground, the bees are still pretty cute! You ask Carlos if he's sure he wouldn't like to keep one for "experimental purposes." A year ago he might have been tempted, but lately he just looks kind of tired, and not up for the added responsibility of a pet, so. The town gathers for an evening of bee-rolling, bee-tossing, and general fun involving the return of giant, unconscious bees to the dog park, from whence they probably came.

All in all, you decide, another successful date.

-

Every detail that is Carlos is inconsequential, and yet: you are in love with the unevenness of his eyelashes, with the single hair that grows wildly out of his left eyebrow, with the name of his favorite wine, with the amount of sugar he puts in his coffee, with the hair on his arms, with the softness of his voice. Perhaps you’ve neglected the needs of the man you tried on like a suit for a few decades, and they’re shining through tenfold. Perhaps Carlos really is just perfect, in a cosmically aligned, ritual sacrifices to seal the deal sort of way. He _is_ a Virgo.

After the whole bee thing, you brought him back to yours for some much needed rest. It probably wasn't the hero's welcome he deserved: you haven't tidied it in awhile, and the dog left a few choice ectoplasm-stains on the walls while you were out, and he looked so grey at the edges that you did little more than loosen the buttons of his shirt and ease off his shoes in the bedroom. You tucked him into your bed and held him so his snores wheezed perfectly to the hollow of your throat, because he seems to like that. Your arms are very long, very thin, comparatively, but he settles in them when he has the chance, and you hold on carefully, very much wanting to get this right. Hope springs eternal, but you are not a stupid man, not made of a stupid man--and you could screw this up. Either by being too human, or not enough.

It's the best kind of nervous you've ever been. He blinks in and out of sleep throughout the night, beautiful in every state of kempt and unkempt, every kind of light, and hot like the core of something, pressing up against you. It's so familiar--minus the sweat soaking heavy into your mattress--and as the fever becomes a fever, as the fever breaks, he claws at you like a thing trying to be born. 

You don't _think_ he's molting, but you ease off the rest of his clothes just in case.

"Sorry," he whispers, blearing awake as you slide the jeans from his ankles. He starfishes over the sheet, searching out the edge of the sweat-stain and failing with a groan. "It's fine," you tell him. Fine to see him sit up in the dark, in his underwear. Fine to wash him out of your sheets, fine to hear his voice in your room, tonight. Everything good is also fragile, you know, but not for the first time you remember: Carlos is good, Carlos is most definitely fragile. You have to be careful when you fit your hands under his arms, when you press your forehead to his damp curls. "Did you get stung," you ask the side of his face, guiding him off the bed and toward the bathroom. 

"Not by a bee," he murmurs. The light blinds him, and he doesn't elaborate. In the mirror, the faceless woman waves from the dark corners of your room, and you both stand in the doorway holding the other up against the edges. "I have to pee," he announces, and you nod once. He catches your wrist as you leave, shaking his head. "You could run the bath."

You _could_. You forget yourself, forget to breathe and forget to keep the lids down on your bone-white eyes. This is a _milestone_ , to be sure! It could take years to reach this point, and your heart hardly knows what to do with its arrival. Nothing! Until Carlos slides his eyes shut and jostles you on his way in. "Menso," he huffs, kicking out of his briefs and gathering, pulling on his hair with one hand. You don't have to watch him to see him, but you don't turn your head, watching him stand, sigh, flush the toilet, turn on the sink. "The bath," he repeats, and you nearly trip overself in your panic to comply. When he judges that the water coming out of your tap is just water, he fills a dixie cup and drinks, five times, then splashes it on his face. Water drips from his eyebrows, lashes, nose, lips, chin. You'll remember that--the way the drops catch the light, they way the water saturates the color of his skin--like you remember the pearl brightness of the hard-baked sand in the sun.

"Beautiful Carlos," you sigh, wrapping yourself around him from behind. Water burbles steadily into the tub, and he manages to sag upwards, into your weight. He steadies you both with his hands on the counter, his head hung low and hidden under his hair. "Sweet, overworked Carlos," you continue, kissing the top vertebrae where it ridges just under the skin. Carlos shivers, and sags with gravity this time, so you're holding him up at the waist. He is good, and fragile: maybe he's finally realizing it. 

"I love you," you tell him.

"I know," he tells you.

Carlos turns in your grip and pushes you, until you're pressed to the short wall by the door. He kisses you soundly, where you expected desperation--then lets gravity have him again and bites a whine to your throat. There has never been a greater sound in all creation, a greater feeling than this man naked and sheened in cold-sweat shoving his hands too-hard at your ribs and holding you against your bathroom wall. You will most definitely try to capture the moment adequately in your report to the city council.

But, later. His fingers press to the muscle of your shoulder, propping his thumb to push back your jaw. You hold it up for him as he trails the digit down the faint seam of your skin, where you sometimes have to shave the tiniest curling sheaths of new leaves after a long soak or bout in the rain. You do hope he hasn't found any of them now. How embarrassing, to be inadequately groomed on only the sixth date. "Cecil," he says, dragging the sigh out of you, hard. "Cecil." His hands drag down your shirt, unbuttoning, pushing aside, and you let go of him long enough to shrug out of the sleeves. He tugs your undershirt up and over your head, tosses it, pins your wrists beautifully under his hands and stands up on his toes to kiss you again. Your sternum quivers so hard it hurts, so hard you can't breathe, and you let out such a gasp when he pulls away. "Cecil," he says again, and you find the air to answer, _Carlos_ , like you are the first people, the only people, making up the start of a language. 

"Cecil," he says one more time, and you are dizzy from not breathing, dizzy from being so achingly hard, dizzy from love--when he sloshes his foot sideways and snorts. "We forgot the water," he points out, and breaks wearily, beautifully, into laughter.

You find your edges again, your grounded, human edges, and look around the corner at the tub. The burble is a steady fall of water over the sides, filling the cracks in the linoleum and reaching for your bedroom carpet. "Oh my god," you wheeze, and he has to catch you at the edges of the puddle as you leap to shut the water off. Clutching him with one arm, you turn the knob, quieting the room to your paired breathing, and the tinkle of water still slipping to the floor. He laughs, and laughs, until the laugh is the absence of his breathing against your face, and you have to laugh too. Carefully, he sits you on the tub, instantly soaking your pants, and leans on you. "Your face," he gasps, and leans harder, helpless. You hold him up and shake with it, your voice loud and echoing in the small room. All of you is shaking, from the fear-want knot in your chest to the balls of your feet, splashing quietly on the floor. He takes a deep breath, another, fixes his hands firm to the muscles of your shoulders. Waits for you to sober, and is sobered, staring at the soft look he leaves on your face and smoothing his hands just-so, down to your arms. You could screw this up, but you haven't yet, and hope springs eternal as he kisses you gently on the forehead and reaches for the top of your wet jeans.

All of you is shaking, not quite breathing, and just beyond the shadowed edge of his ribs: the empty dixie cup shivers to the edge of the sink, falls in.

-

"Has anyone ever measured the canyon," he asks, sitting next to you on the trunk of his car a safe distance from the glowing clouds. "How deep is it?"

You're flattered, that he'd ask _you_ , but can only answer _very, very deep_ and watch him furrow his brow, unfurrow with the realization that he might not, actually, want to know. "How wide, then," which is the real question, the easier question. You look at him peaceably, with all of your fond patience. "Cecil," he finally asks, "is it getting wider?"

You smile hugely. "Narrower, I think." Thinking about it is expressly forbidden, but Carlos works so _hard_ , does so much good for the town. You feel he has a right to know. "It'll close, one day."

"And then things will get better, for Night Vale?"

His concern is touching, beautiful, perfect. Your smile widens, is not the man's smile, is a little sinister. "Oh no," you promise him. "Much, much worse."

"Oh," he says. His lips thin just the slightest, as if _worse_ will come in the next few minutes. It certainly might!

You put your hand on his knee, squeezing gently. "Don't worry," you say, and this is also a promise: "We'll definitely fix it."

Before he takes you home in his economic--but still attractive--hybrid coupe, you toe your shoes off at the bumper and walk out on the cool night sand. Carlos sits alone and watches you, like he’s waiting for something. Like the night will swallow you, or you will sprout many pairs of wings, many eyes, and burn him with some truth. He is a very courteous man, to give you your space in the face of the long and uncertain night.

You walk to the glow of the canyon, feeling your feet touch the ground and the ground touch them back. Sand sticks to your skin, sweat cools on your sides. You walk until the oxygen is too thin, the radon gas just thin enough, that you stop breathing. The earth is too certain of its purpose to shake, but you know it is moving, pushing, ready to collide. He might be standing on his side of the rift even now, breathing deep from the glowing cloud and spitting fresh newts onto the dry ground. He might be grinning, is probably grinning, and waiting.

You’re probably going to kill him, next time. Carlos might help, and that is also definitely a milestone! Hopefully there will still be a council to report it to, if the elections keep running smoothly. If your reports remain so glaringly perfect, you’ll probably have the honor of a trip to the abandoned mine shaft, to ensure his cooperation this year.

Grinning, you turn and jog back to the breathable air. Carlos is still at the car: his shadow against silver, your shadow against seafoam green. Lifting a hand, you wave to him. After a moment, he waves back. When your lungs stop popping on the inside, you ground your feet in the sand and lope back to him, back to the present.

-

Eventually, you make it to the bath. Another wave of water sloshes away from your collective weight, and there are too many limbs, not enough room, and yet. He lets you wash the sweat from his hair, absently petting your dog when she comes to lap at the wet floor. He lets you rinse him, and turn him, and hold him up in the water while he dozes in the shallows of sleep. It is the worst way to sleep, in Night Vale, and he kicks a little as terror caresses the edges of his consciousness, where it is always lurking. You admit you let this happen a moment longer than is kind, to watch his face. Perhaps you should wish him less tired, his eyes less sunken, his hair less greyed. But he is as beautiful when he frowns as when he laughs, as breathtaking tired and mewling as he is when passionately awake.

He is perfect. It is that simple.

You scratch the corner of his jaw, where he’s started to clench his teeth. His foot splashes up from the water in a tic and he wakes up to the lukewarm water and your pearly white eyes, both holding him in place. When you smile, your practised, imperfect smile, he smiles back. “Hello.”

”Hello,” you answer, smoothing the hair back from his face. “Do you want to get up?”

”Yeah.” He moves gingerly up from the water, and you don’t help, kissing absently at his back as he untangles from you. He laughs it, and you, off, moving carefully on the wet floor to the bathroom closet. By the time you follow, he’s toweled off and thrown several on the floor. He is a practical man, perhaps before all other things. And it is practical, to use your towel to pull him closer, to back out of the room with him laughing, following.

-

From the moment you were born, you had a purpose to ground you. Protect the desert, protect the town, from what lies on the other side. It is the purpose of every Night Vale citizen, but especially you, as the first. And maybe especially Carlos, because of his nature, because--love is the thing that ungrounds you, shakes you, but tethers you to your purpose like nothing else.

_Sometimes things seem so strange, or malevolent, and then you find that, underneath, it was something else altogether: something pure, and innocent._

He uses that trophy as an elaborate paper weight, along with every other solid and kind of useless thing in his apartment, and you don’t hold it against him. Everything Carlos does--his long hours, his selective and _wholly accidental_ inability to retain half of the things you say to him, his worries and frustrations and fevers--is done out of love. It’s kind of what you love about him, when the ever narrower questions of the council’s mandatory reports force the point.

On the bed, Carlos keeps abortively pinning you, like you grow an extra limb for every one he gets hold of. When he gives up, digs into your bedside table, you glance down to make sure you aren’t. Nothing like the sudden appearance of a third arm or a second head to change the mood in a bedroom considerably, though not always for the worse. With Carlos, you think it would be worse. He _is_ a Virgo.

”Where are your condoms,” he asks, popping the cap of the lube to smell it, cautiously. He shouldn’t worry, it’s military grade and hardly _ever_ dries to a heavy and painful crust that takes several days to chafe off. In fact, you can only remember it doing that one time, to you. “Do you even--” he squints at you, making you grin reflexively, sheepishly.

”They were out. The council rations them any time there’s a particularly large loss of life in the town, you know how it goes!” The look on his face informs you that he really did not know, did not want to know--but he breathes and probably decides on what exactly he plans to drink, to forget. “That’s okay,” he eventually says.

“ _Really_ ” you answer brightly, making him slap the outside of your thigh and cough like Khoshekh swallowing a hairball.

”I mean we’ll do something _else_.” He rolls his perfect brown eyes, but also kisses you. You are nervously laughing and going _okay_ when he arranges your legs in his lap and arranges his hand on your dick. The lube has decided to cooperate, the way you were pretty sure it would, and he smells like the bloodoak shampoo you got on sale at the local Bath and Body Works last Tuesday. He is so lovely, kissing his way down your chest, that you haven’t the ire to spare when your fax machine rings and begins to spit out a piece of paper. Mrs. Carlsberg, rest her soul, did not raise her son to become this.

”Ignore it,” Carlos murmurs to your hip, where there is definitely some greenery at the seams, definitely some leftover, hardy grass sticking out in embarrassing spines. He rustles it quietly with his fingers, paused but not deterred. “You’re...amazing,” and your chest knots up again, your eyebrows crawl up your face with the force of your smile. Carlos’ smile is a lot softer when he proposes the best way to deliver praise is with a slick finger pressing inside of you, which is kind of it’s own very good, very solid, substantiating argument. Substantive enough you don’t deduct points for the lack of transition to his other hand lifting you with the firmest first tug, holding you steady to the warm touch of his tongue on the head and that’s it, before he sucks a ragged breath and goes down.

There are systems of roots under your skin and he has you by them now, is inside of you and pulling you out. He isn’t trying to open you, just keeps his finger burning and soothing with its hard knuckles, blunt tip. Elbows up, you press the heels of your hands to your face and claw the skin under your eyes: he stings deeper, and you kick the sheets once with a ridiculous gurgle. When he pops off, you expect a laugh, but not the one he hums so suddenly close to your chest. There’s his face between your arms, and his mouth so smooth and slick against your mouth. You feel distinctly cornered, with his hands moving in and on you and his weight right there, really there, and it has been such a long time since the feeling didn’t crawl terror all over your guts. Terror you can laugh at, terror kind of tickles at this point but this is a feeling you just have to ride out--ride the second finger he pushes in and gasp so his tongue is pushing up behind your teeth. He’s talking to you, after that. Appealing to you to come, then imploring: then his hand squeezes and slips and _moves_ and he _tells_ you, “Cecil, Cecil, _now_.”

Somewhere across town a needle is tracing earthquakes to the page. Somewhere his machines are drowning a space in bone-white paper, and the earth beneath each page is completely still. Somewhere, a tectonic plate is tuning in to his voice and throwing itself at its neighbor with renewed purpose. Somewhere the sun is setting on time, and somewhere, beyond all the fevers and dry air and broken air conditioning, there is snow.

Somewhere--a lot of somewheres--the ground is steady and silent and mostly not a living thing. But in this town, in this room, he cracks you open and you stare at the void of your ceiling with bone-white eyes, and you can feel how hard it shakes.

-

“Dark times are coming to Night Vale, dear listeners. Dark times indeed.” Perhaps this is almost always the case, and should have been a general disclaimer at the start of each show. You’re pretty sure it was the sum of your report in the _first_ show, or maybe you’re thinking of that switchboard gig you had in Anchorage for awhile, or the stock market crash, or the other stock market crash, or that time someone wanted to build an hotel next to the site of a colonial territory dispute.

It is probably the sum of a lot of your reports, actually. “The bake sale to raise legal fees and campaign funding for Hiram McDaniels was a severe disappointment; John Peters, you know, the farmer, reports that his imaginary corn crop has suddenly become tangible; Desert Bluffs maintained their winning streak at last night’s football game. And, most devastating of all: this morning Carlos paused at at the bathroom mirror, pushed his perfect, shining hair away from his face, and informed me of plans to get another haircut. I have to pay my respects: he certainly knows how to keep the emotional roller coaster that is every worthwhile relationship firmly on its tracks. 

“Prepare your mourning garments and sympathetic dirges for sometime this Thursday. To our current barber, prepare for your subsequent ostracization and possible madness to begin that evening.”

You pause, for effect, and to plant your feet firmly on the station floor. Far below you, far below Night Vale, you can feel the plate dragging your beloved town ever closer to its Armageddon. “Before I leave you tonight, dear listeners, let me implore you to keep all despair and dread of the coming months to a minimum. Sometimes you look to the horizon and you are looking into the void, into a vast plane without light, or stars, or hope--and sometimes you are apparently just seeing that one mountain blocking part of the sky. Dark times are coming to this town--especially you, Steve Carlsberg--but it is going to be alright. 

“It is all going to be alright. Goodnight, Night Vale. Goodnight.”

**Author's Note:**

> i'm using [my cecil headcanon](http://titykoi.tumblr.com/post/55609392853/cecil-design-in-color) for this, which involves some skin-wearing desert golem shit where he was created in opposition to kevin/desert bluffs. other than that, i have no idea what i'm doing, and i hope the story survived in spite of that.
> 
> kudos to anyone who handles the feel of this show well in their fic b/c it is difficult as fuck, srsly.


End file.
